I found Never Let Me Go to be a surprisingly frustrating novel in its voice and in its pacing: frustrating in how those two choices of style connect and disconnect from the great history of novels and stories whose narrative voice comes from a young woman, turning of age, authored by a man. There is something to think about in Never Let Me Go about the trustworthiness of the narrator, though probably more importantly, the novel reminds me of the style of [book: Catcher In The Rye], when the reader is lost in the construct of the narrator’s voice until the author can no longer resist himself and his didactic lesson breaks through. It’s that intentionality to the narrator being, as men like to write young girls, sometimes scattered and clueless that slows down the story being told and — though this could all be intentional to build on the romance of the last movement — loses the impact of the revelations made throughout the book.Still, I kept reading; sometimes irked that I was being asked to suspend the natural progression of thoughts to what weren’t cleverly hidden revelations when I think a tougher, more challenging novel addressing the same themes would have found a way to retain the believability of Ishiguro’s characters without drawing out their internal dialogues for so long. There is that history of narrators like Kathy H. in this book, but what makes them hard to judge as literary figures is our intruding author, and how reliable of a narrator he decides to be.P.S. James Wood in his excellent review for The New Republic obviously gets the book at a higher level than I do. I wish I could chat up Mr. Wood a little more as he’s already making me second guess all the thoughts I’ve written above.
